D-GRACE: Discounted Spectrum Price Game-Based Resource Allocation in a Competitive Environment for TVWS Networks

The IEEE 802.22 standard targets rural and sparsely populated regions exploiting television white space (TVWS) technology. In these regions, there are fewer mobile users per density and end-user traffic is light. Hence, there is a need to adopt traffic aware algorithm leveraging on the end-user nonuniform traffic attributes and in essence, promote spectrum efficiency in the TVWS spectrum-management regime. This paper investigates a mechanism to encourage spectrum sharing during low end-user traffic regime motivated by financial inducement. Since incumbent coexistence has been achieved using market models, it is tractable to apply market-assisted spectrum sharing models to address self-coexistence issues in TVWS networks. The purpose of this paper is to use the market model to promote self-coexistence in TVWS networks in the uplink self-frequency reuse. Toward this goal, this paper proposes discounted spectrum price game-based resource allocation in a competitive environment (D-GRACE). Specifically, D-GRACE is a transmit power reduction strategy motivated by financial incentives during light TVWS end-user traffic. When compared with an existing non-market-inspired TVWS self-coexistence resource allocation algorithm under the same scenario, D-GRACE exhibited superior power savings of about 20% and converged after five iterations.